Is it possible to leverage screenplay information to predict movie profitability and assist the descision-making process for screenplay selection?

• A. There is a high linear relationship between movie budget and box office revenue.
• B. It is a lot more interesting to predict the profitabilty of a movie.

• Some features that were tried but failed to produce convincing results: readability index, sentiment analysis, tf-idf, tf-idf with POS tagging.

• word2vec - Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space (published by Google).

• Allows to cluster words with similar meaning. These clusters can be used as features in a predictive model.

\[ \hat{y} = x_{budget} + \sum_{i=1}^{n} x_{i, word2vec} \]

• Used 10-fold cross-validation to benchmark a variety of regression models for profitability prediction: linear regression (LR), MARS, SVM, Random Forest (RF), Generalized boosting (GBM) and CART.

• Because we only use screenplay information, the main challenge is the identification, extraction and selection of features that may be available in movie scripts.

• Some features that were tried but failed to produce convincing results: readability index, sentiment analysis, tf-idf, tf-idf with POS tagging.

• word2vec - Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space (published by Google).

• Allows to cluster words with similar meaning. These clusters can be used as features in a predictive model.

• The data also offers the opportunity for some sentiment analysis of movie scripts.

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